Technology is freakin’ amazing.
Thanks to some lower back pain, I got a hands-on experience with digital radiography today. For five bucks — that’s five US dollars — they gave me a CD with the Dicom image files to take home.
Am I going to share those images? Converted to JPEG format on this very website? You bet I am, after the jump.
Sat down this Saturday afternoon at TRF for a nice plate of bees (right), and had a lovely chat 
with Michelle Casady of The Eagle (Bryan / College Station). We talked about renaissance fairs, and what might possess people to go to them, how many times we’ve been (“Is there even a number that big?”), and the details of our attire. (“My costume is itching me. Do I have to wear this? I don’t wanna wear this.”)
Despite her persistent questioning, I kept quiet about the fact that pretty much every other shop has an opium den in the back, not to mention the place being a non-stop orgy after closing. She wrote a nice article for her newspaper, one that may well lure more unsuspecting victims into the louche and depraved life of the regular renaissance fair patron.
Oct 12
It’s renfaire season again. (Pause for cries of “Nerrrrrds!” and “Huzzah!”) If your home fair is as mine, they issue instructions to “prepare thyself for merriment!” But the promotional materials I’ve seen have been a little sparse on the topic of what exactly that preparation entails. Lack of sufficient preparation for merriment is indeed a common and heartbreaking problem.
If you’ve always wanted to know what an experienced fair-goer might carry in that odd little leather pouch on his belt, the mystery will be revealed after the jump.
Sep 15
Return of the King, 1st US Edition Cover
Did you hear the one about the Aggie who had a truly first-class library of science fiction and fantasy?
The denizens of Texas A&M University take a lot of stick, some fraction of which they may perhaps deserve. As I’m a Rice alumnus, you may believe me when I say I’ve heard (and repeated) my share of the dreadful jokes.
But this post is about one of the places where not only have the Aggies excelled, but have done so within the realm of unqualified, unabashed flat-out geekishness — one of my personal favorite sorts of excellence, and one I deeply admire.
Is this thing on?
I’ve been henke@insync.net for a long damn time.
To the best of my ability to recall, my first email address was something or other @lanl.gov. This would be around or about 1987. After a four-year (somewhat overlapping) stint as something boring @rice.edu (Go Owls!), I wallowed in low-grade snark and minor infamy as henke@netcom.com and henke@scaly.ssc.gov. This would bring our timeline to approximately 1993.
After that, it was a move to Houston and henke@phoenix.net. I have fond memories of the phoenix account, notably the improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio of my email stream stemming from the inability of stupid people to spell “phoenix”. This was about the time spam was becoming a real problem, so although I was a frequent poster to UseNet, I munged addresses.
That brings us to 1999 (party as though it were same) and henke@insync.net. As of this writing, that account it still active. As of the dawn of 2010, it will not be. Alas, the fantastic, local, hacker-run insync.net was too good for this troubled world, and was gobbled up by texas.net lo, these many years ago. While the original domain still stands, I’ve grown tired of shelling out the Croessian sum of twenty bucks a month for a simple email forward and POP mailbox.
Thus, I’ve hired hostmonster and registered the domain ‘mythopoeic.org’, at which I’m dhenke (as there’s an ahenke also, with whom I desire email parity — while I’m still Henke of Clan Henke, that’s only for formal occasions).
While hand-crafting HTML (and/or XHTML) with a plain old text editor has long been my habit, I have come around to the view that time spent on that sort of attention to detail is time that would serve both my readers and myself better were I to spend it on content. And, Hostmonster had an easy way to install WordPress, so, well… here we are.
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